Landscapes of Futures Past is an exhibition of contemporary video art, digital animation, installation, and traditional artistic media such as tapestry and painting, reframed through the lens of our digitized era. Bringing together artists from Australia, China, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Japan, Poland, Russia, Singapore, and the U.K., the exhibition unfolds as a visual journey through the terrains and multiverses of time and space.

A landscape is a terrain, or a view of it, onto which we project our aesthetic, emotional, spiritual, and physical needs. What we perceive in the land is not only what is physically there, but also what we bring to it: a sense of history and a longing for future, as well as a desire for beauty, a feeling of identity and belonging, or a fear of the unknown, a drive for survival, a hunger for control.

The works shown here are vessels for stories that unfold across time, revealing how landscapes are not static scenes, but living archives of human presence, absence, imagination and desire. The paradox of “futures past” written into the exhibition’s title evokes spaces where both timelines collide, where utopias are imagined and erased, where memories and myth become embedded in the ground beneath our feet.

Whether on a scientific or a metaphysical level, the understanding of time and space is most often a dichotomy between the circular and the linear — between traditional and quantum cosmologies that view time as cyclical or fluid, and other frameworks that measure it as linear and progressive. This tension underpins the temporal dislocations in Landscapes of Futures Past, where imagined futures and ancestral pasts converge, collapse, and reconfigure the landscapes that we inhabit and that others will inherit.

Cinema has always been a way of travelling without moving, of gathering together with friends and strangers to embark on shared journeys, to discover distant landscapes or to revisit familiar terrains through new cinematic eyes. Cinema is uniquely capable of folding time and space, collapsing memory and imagination into a single frame.

In parallel with the artworks from China and around the world presented in this exhibition, film curator Li Zhenhua has assembled a cinematic cartography that traces landscapes of futures past—visions shaped by history, displacement, aspiration, and change. This Open-Air Cinema Programme, invites audiences to journey through time and place, across decades and through the diverse geographies of China, revealing how different landscapes remember, transform, and look to the future.

The Landscapes of Futures Past Open-Air Cinema, presented in partnership with the CIFRA Platform, comes to life every Saturday throughout the exhibition — an invitation to reflect, gather, and imagine together under the open sky, set against the evocative backdrop of Jiading’s grape vineyards and rice fields.

– David Elliott, Rachel Rits-Volloch, Li Zhenhua